Working with traditional location data takes a significant amount of work per project. This means that analysts must stick closely to their objectives and provide only the most essential insights before moving to the next project. This also means that decision makers must be very specific with their requests for analyst work, and often miss opportunities for growth.

I wanted to encourage exploration with the early stages of the experience, but not get in the way of users trying to find a specific location relevant to their product. For this reason, I took inspiration from a place of familiarity. I designed the experience to function similar to Google Maps. User interview showed that even GIS analysts thought of it first in the context of POI based mapping applications, and even used it in their workflow to discover locations near potential sites they were researching.

The UI also needed to be functional, so I opted to include additional functionality on this screen. Namely, the ability to create comparison groups, allowing users to perform a common action based on user interviews.